“At 19, I’d never known anyone who had died, with the exception of my grandfather, who’d been old and far away. I’d never been to a funeral. I understood nothing of that kind of loss – of the crumbling of the physical texture of lives lived, the way the meaning of a place could change because those who used to be in it were no longer there. I knew nothing about the hopelessness and the necessity of trying to capture such lives – to rescue them, to keep them from vanishing altogether.”